There are various ways to deploy or implement a wireless communication network. In a particular implementation or architecture, the wireless communication network can be deployed as a Distributed Antenna System (DAS), where a network of spatially separated antenna notes is connected to a central unit via a transport medium. A related concept or architecture is the Centralized Radio Access Networks (RAN) or Cloud RAN (C-RAN), where spatially separated Remote Radio Units (RRUs) or Remote Radio Heads (RRHs) providing wireless coverage to a large area are connected to a centralized controller or processor. For DAS, C-RAN, or other similar architectures, the links or networks between the central node and the radio nodes are referred to as the fronthaul. The interface on fronthaul can either be proprietary or can be based on an industry standard, known as the Common Publish Radio Interface (CPRI). Specifically, the CPRI standard defines the interface of base stations between the Radio Equipment Controller (REC), Digital Units (DUs), or Baseband Unit (BBU), to local or remote radio units (RUs), such as Radio Equipment (RE), RUs, and/or RRHs.
With the continuing advancement of radio access technology, such as the Long Term Evolution (LTE) and LTE-Advanced, the requirement on the CPRI data rate also increases significantly. For example, CPRI data rate between a BBU and a RRU for a 3-sector 20 mega-Hertz (MHz) LTE system with 2×2 multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) may require about 6 giga-bits per second (Gbps). However, an LTE system capable of 8×8 MIMO and carrier aggregation may require one or several order of magnitudes increase in the CPRI data rate (e.g., 60 Gbps). One way to address the increase in the CPRI data rate is to deploy more links (typically fibers) connecting the BBUs and the RRHs, but such deployment can be costly.